This AI Algorithm Can Create Digital Copies of Real-World Objects

"Physically-based differentiable rendering has recently emerged as an attractive new technique for solving inverse problems that recover complete 3D scene representations from images. The inversion of shape parameters is of particular interest but also poses severe challenges: shapes are intertwined with visibility, whose discontinuous nature introduces severe bias in computed derivatives unless costly precautions are taken," comments the team. "Shape representations like triangle meshes suffer from additional difficulties since the continuous optimization of mesh parameters cannot introduce topological changes. One common solution to these difficulties entails representing shapes using signed distance functions (SDFs) and gradually adapting their zero level set during optimization."